Something I've neglected to mention is the fact that I did succeed in getting a multi-user environment set up inside Unity. There are a number of solutions available, insofar as the server is concerned, and I decided to go with SmartFox. The only real reason being that it was quick to set up and I don't have a lot of time to create one from scratch. You can read more about the SmartFox server software here. It might seem overkill, considering it was actually designed to support MMOs and not meant for smaller scale projects, but it does the job.

The video below shows the app in action, I'll upload a browser based version of the multi-user environment at a later date. I'm not sure how the University feels about people seeing this stuff at such an early stage of development. The character models are from turbosquid and have been modified.

More soon. ;]

Apologies for the lack of entries, I'm currently busy with teaching and doing my masters. I promise to write up a few more tutorials over the coming holiday season and I have plans to write a small e-book detailing how to use Unity 3D, the different lighting solutions the program supports and a more advanced shader tutorial.

I'm currently building a haunted house as part of another project I'm doing. I can't reveal too much as I need to protect my ideas.

This could potentially end up being a multi-user environment (now that I've got net code down), but its real purpose is to scare the pants off people. Below is a small preview of a scene designed to lull the user into a false sense of security.

Since Unity added real-time ambient occlusion, the results you can get with the lighting are phenomenal. The problem is that it kills your machine, the hit to performance is massive. Considering my implementation of Unity has always involved the web browser, I need to make sure I don't put too much strain on the GPU. To that end, I'm still working with lightmaps for the moment.

You can make intelligent use of the real-time light sources, using layers, but short of that you really do need a good GPU.

More soon!

Edit: Included a small video.

A few days ago Unity 3D was made free. You read correctly, as of version 2.6 you don't have to pay a penny if you want to develop with this engine now. Some of you are no doubt scratching your heads so let's get down to what this means...

Normally I'd be a little more sensationalistic in my writing, but this is an extremely important step for Unity and demands to be treated with reverance. This is a great service to the community and, of equal importance, an extremely smart business decision. In the past I've written about how developing standards is important on the web, and the difficulties involved with getting everyone to use a particular 3D plugin. With the authoring environment now being free, the rate of adoption is going to sky rocket, again. The first major increase Unity saw in their sales was when they released a Windows version of the authoring environment (it originally being a mac only program), the company benefited from 100% growth in just a few months. Within 48 hours of Unity 2.6 being announced, 6,500 new developers signed up. Unity 3D know that Google are also developing a 3D plugin (Google O3D). By growing their user base, they have guaranteed an influx of new content in the near future. It means that the rate of plugin adoption is going to soar. They are on the verge of establishing a real standard for 3D content on the web. Something to look forward to, for me, is a further increase in traffic to this site. It'll be interesting to see how this change affects the online community. Rest assured that the age of browser based 3D gaming has arrived.

I know I haven't updated my blog in a while, primarily because I'm currently doing my masters in a part-time capacity whilst still holding a full time job. Every week we're asked to create a piece to do with a given theme. This time it was on the subject of portraits. As I'm more of an environment artist I threw together the scene below (youtube).

Again, I'm using Unity 3D for this and, if you have the webplayer installed, you can view it by clicking here.

Modelled with Google Sketchup and lightmapped with the light-up plugin (Vray is great but it takes a while to set up).

More to come soon. I have a few more pieces of work to upload.

I was planning on writing up another tutorial today but decided to take a time out to bring you some interesting statistics regarding the Unity 3D plugin. These are all from the third quarter of 2009.

If you remember the days when Unity was a mac only authoring environment, there was some opposition to bringing it to windows. While it was always able to publish content to the Microsoft OS, everything had to be made on a mac. Since it came to windows (only a few months ago), sales of Unity have doubled (100% growth).

While no one outside the company has exact details regarding the number of plugin installs, some Unity staff have hinted that, as of writing, it is in the 8 figure range with around a million installs a month.

The following stats are based on system information at the time the plugin was downloaded.

Interestingly, Vista is catching up to XP, not that it affects how you work. Admittedly, I'm still using Windows XP and am intending to skip vista altogether if I can. Of more importance are the stats below. Here we can see which shader model (for Windows users) plugin users have. It's important to make sure that, when publishing your content to the web, that it's likely to run on peoples machines. Thankfully, Unity has a useful little tool which allows you to emulate older graphics hardware ('edit' > 'graphics emulation'). From there you can see if your shaders are likely to be visible on older machines.

Something else which is good know are the most common desktop resolutions of plugin users. Widescreen resolutions are doing quite well, but a lot of people are still using 1024x768. This isn't an issue for me as, these days, I design my webplayers to expand to the full width and height of the browser window.

That just about covers it. The moment that the concrete number of plugin installs becomes available, I'll be sure to update the blog.

Update

The following comment was made yesterday by Aras Pranckevičius, a Unity developer. Having two staff commenting on these statistics gives the numbers a little more credence.

Comment from: Aras Pranckevičius [Visitor] · http://aras-p.info
The number of web player installs is about 14 million since 2008 February. We don't have definite number of installs that were before that.

Thank you to Aras for for confirming the figures.

Thanks for your time and happy dev'ing!